Coinbase Wants to Sell Americans Apple Stock That Never Expires
Form 1-N and Form BD-N went to the SEC on September 1 to bring 24/7 equity perpetuals onshore. The CFTC still has to sign off — and the product Coinbase is importing was built by crypto, for crypto.
Coinbase filed notice-registration forms with the SEC on September 1. Coinbase Derivatives submitted Form 1-N to register as a security futures exchange; Coinbase Financial Markets filed Form BD-N as a limited-purpose broker-dealer.
Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad announced it publicly on September 3: "Equity perps have proven demand internationally, and we're excited at the prospect of a regulated pathway for U.S. investors."
The product is perpetual futures on stocks. No expiry, continuous trading, leverage. Coinbase already offers them internationally on names including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon. It wants to bring them onshore.
What a perpetual actually is
A traditional futures contract has an expiry date. That date is the mechanism that forces convergence: as expiry approaches, the futures price must approach the spot price, because settlement is coming.
A perpetual has no expiry. It stays open indefinitely, which means it needs a different mechanism to stay tethered to spot. That mechanism is the funding rate — a periodic payment between longs and shorts, whose sign and size depend on whether the contract is trading above or below the underlying. Trade rich to spot and longs pay shorts; trade cheap and shorts pay longs. The payment is the tether.
Crypto invented this. It exists because 24/7 markets with no settlement infrastructure and no delivery mechanism needed a way to offer leveraged directional exposure without a physical settlement chain. It became the dominant instrument in crypto derivatives volume, and platforms like Hyperliquid built entire businesses on it.
What Coinbase is proposing is to take that structure — designed for an asset class with no market close, no corporate actions, and no settlement date — and apply it to equities, which have all three.
The hard part is not regulatory
The filing is the visible obstacle. It is not the interesting one.
A perpetual on Apple has to handle things a perpetual on Bitcoin never encounters. Dividends: the underlying drops by the dividend on the ex-date, mechanically, and the contract has to account for that or every long gets a free haircut four times a year. Splits and corporate actions: the reference price discontinuously changes. Halts: an equity can stop trading for news pending, leaving a 24/7 contract marking against a price that no longer exists. Weekends and overnight: the underlying does not trade, but the perpetual does — so for roughly two-thirds of every week, the contract is pricing an asset with no live reference.
That last one is the real design problem, and it is also the entire appeal. The demand for 24/7 equity exposure is genuine: retail traders outside US hours, hedgers reacting to weekend news, and anyone who has watched a stock gap 8% at the open on information that was public on Saturday.
Whoever solves it captures a real market. Whoever solves it badly creates an instrument that detaches from the underlying every weekend and reconverges violently at 9:30 Monday.
Two regulators, one product
The SEC filing does not authorize anything. Before US customers can trade these, Coinbase also needs CFTC approval.
That split is the structural oddity. Security futures sit in the seam between the two agencies — the SEC governs securities, the CFTC governs futures, and instruments that are both have historically been where products go to die in jurisdictional limbo. Single-stock futures in the US have a long history of being technically legal and commercially dead for exactly this reason.
What is different now is precedent. The CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures for US listing in May 2026, greenlighting both KalshiEX and Coinbase. That established that perpetuals as a contract structure are approvable onshore. Coinbase is arguing that the structure travels — that if the mechanism is sound for one underlying, the underlying's asset class is a detail.
The SEC will not see it as a detail. But the agency's posture has visibly loosened: the cancelled crypto rule returning as a proposal, a spot ETF for a privacy asset clearing to market, and now a notice registration for equity perps that did not get discouraged out of existence before filing.
Why Coinbase specifically
Coinbase does not need another crypto product. It needs a reason to matter to people who do not trade crypto.
Its business is cyclical in the most brutal way — volumes track crypto volatility, and the company has posted the pattern of winning record market share while still losing money in a bad tape. Equity perpetuals are a hedge against that cycle. They are a derivatives product, on the world's most liquid underlyings, using infrastructure Coinbase already runs, sold to an audience that already has an account.
It is also a land grab. If 24/7 equity trading becomes normal, the venue that establishes it first holds the order book. Traditional exchanges are structurally slow to launch a product that competes with their own session hours; Coinbase has no session hours to protect.
What to watch
The filing is a notice registration, not an approval, and the CFTC step is the one that determines whether this becomes a product or a press release. Timelines for novel security futures registrations are measured in quarters.
The detail that will tell you whether the product is serious is the funding-rate design over closed markets. If Coinbase publishes a mechanism that handles weekends and halts without letting the contract drift, it built the thing properly. If the mechanism is "the funding rate will sort it out," the first three-day weekend with a news event will demonstrate otherwise.
Either way, the direction is set. The instrument crypto built because it had no closing bell is now being offered to the market that has one.